Katie Stevens, Lachlan Quarmby, and Evan Roderick Talk Filming Providence Falls, Karaoke Bonding, and Love Triangles
In Hallmark Channel’s three-part movie special Providence Falls, rookie detective Cora and visiting detective Liam are partnered up on her very first case… but their connection is deeper than she knows. Liam is actually her love from a past life in 1844 Ireland, but their forbidden romance had consequences that altered history and still echo across time. Now, he’s been sent to present day by the Angels of Destiny to help this modern incarnation of Cora fall in love with her true soulmate instead. Can Liam set things right or will he lose his own soul in the process? Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado caught up with stars Katie Stevens, Lachlan Quarmby, and Evan Roderick to talk filming in Ireland, karaoke bonding, fate, and the love triangle at the heart of it all.
“It was magical,” Katie Stevens told me about playing Cora back to back in three films. “It's every actor's dream to get to travel for work, especially to somewhere as beautiful as Ireland. There were a lot of things that we got to check off the bucket list [with the trilogy] being a romance, period piece, cop drama kind of thing. Being that it was three movies back to back, for me, it almost felt like shooting a season of a series.”
Back to the Future. Austin Powers. Lord of the Rings. There is something special about the number three, especially in cinema. “Telling a trilogy in particular is really unique and interesting. So many of the great franchises are trilogies, right? I just love the fact that the first movie is one thing. It's this cool setup. There's all of these characters getting introduced. We discover the world. Then the second movie inevitably takes this lower tone where maybe there's more hardship, there's more pain,” said Lachlan Quarmby, who plays the roguish Liam. “And then in movie three, we got to ramp it up to this big climax. Going through it like that was like taking one movie, stretching it out, and doing each sort of beat in particular. It was really interesting and fun. I just think that it's such a great way to tell a story in three parts.”
Being able to film three movies at once also allowed the actors to dive deeper into their characters and their bond as a cast. “That's the lucky thing about being able to do three movies back to back is there is a natural banter that you develop over just having spent more time with someone,” shared Evan Roderick, who plays Cora’s “true” soulmate Finn. “We knew that going in that we were going to have the chance to just not force anything and actually let those moments play out and become friends in real life and we did that. I think all of us naturally just had a really good friendship and it wasn't hard. It wasn't hard for us. It was a beautiful chaos.”
And who wouldn’t want to bond as a cast in Ireland? “We had this karaoke bar thing planned out where Katie was going to sing — and Katie's a singer. We had this amazing night in downtown Dublin and Katie sang for us and we all just hung out,” said Roderick about their first evening in Ireland. “We had sushi in Dublin for some reason. I don't know why, but we did. That was probably my favorite moment from the shoot.”
“What didn't I sing? I was doing my own concert,” joked Stevens who got her start auditioning for American Idol, with Quarmby adding: “Picture this. You go into a karaoke room with a world class level singer and then somebody else in the room has to follow that up. I guess I'm going to butcher some Queen now.”
“It was a blast. We did a lot of cast bonding,” continued Stevens. “Guinness and karaoke was really what our bonding nights were like.”
The trilogy finds the actors playing different iterations of themselves in both present day Providence Falls and 1844 Ireland, which meant they all had to learn how to do Irish accents. “I listened to a lot of Colin Farrell,” said Quarmby. “Then I had a few sounds that [we] worked out with our vocal coach that were more old timey just to set it further back and not have it just be a modern Irish accent.”
“I listened to a lot of stuff, but I also made it a point to speak in the accent as often as I could. That was a tip that our coach had given us,” shared Stevens, while Roderick called mastering the accent a “struggle.” He shared that he worked with a vocal coach for three months to tackle it.
Both Liam and Finn represent two different paths for Cora. While Liam is the more unpredictable choice, Finn is “the secure option,” according to Roderick. “Anytime I had a scene with [Cora], my main goal was just ‘I have to make her feel super safe, super secure,’ and be the best at making her feel secure,” he explained. “I tried to approach that in every scene that we did together because that's really the thing that Finn has to offer. He doesn't have this rogue, thieving, stealing kind of charm to him. He's just kind of down the barrel. Anytime I had a chance to have a scene with her, it was just, ‘Here's security. Do you want security?’”
Providence Falls is also all about second chances — at love, at life, and at doing the right thing. For Quarmby’s Liam, a second chance “meant everything.” “It meant everything in the greater context of a second chance with, what is he going to do with it? He's so lucky to get the second chance. He didn't expect to get it at all,” he shared. “Is he going to do the thing that he feels most in his heart or is he going to do the right thing? The right thing according to destiny, right? It was just a joy to […] explore that and try and understand what Liam was going through.”
The films play with the idea of fate and what’s meant to be, which begs the question: Are we guided by destiny or do we create our own paths? The cast had differing opinions. “I flip in-between, but this is really speaking my language. I'm always thinking this way. I think when certain things happen in your life, you want to believe that fate is involved and the dots are being connected for a reason,” said Roderick. “And unfortunately, sometimes things don't go your way and then you start to think, ‘Oh, maybe this thing wasn't pre-planned or written out beforehand.’ It’s a shame when I think that way because I do like feeling like we have a purpose here and that there's some meaning to what we're doing,”
“I think about how many different ways my life could have gone had I just made a different choice. Like when I was 16, if I just decided that I wasn't going to go audition for American Idol, I probably wouldn't be here,” shared Stevens. “So I think that we create our own destinies based on what we want from our life. You make decisions of what kind of choices, where you're going to move to, what career path you're going to go down, and you make little choices that eventually lead you to whatever your destiny is. But I think that ultimately is up to us and our choices and our desires for what we want our life to look like.”
Surprisingly, Providence Falls and Stevens’ first TV role on Faking It have something juicy in common… a complicated Liam love triangle. “I'm sorry. You're not my first Liam,” laughed Stevens, calling both love triangles equally complicated and “equally special in my life as Katie to be able to play.” “They're both complicated for completely different reasons. Karma, Amy, and Liam was dealing with the complication of a best friendship that had some more complicated feelings while one girl was looking to be accepted. [Providence Falls] is dealing through time and space and hundreds of years of love in the making.”
“You are my number one Liam though,” she said to Quarmby. “Sorry, Gregg [Sulkin].”
Providence Falls: Chance of a Lifetime premieres August 2 on Hallmark Channel. The trilogy continues with An Impossible Promise on August 9 and Thief of Fate on August 16.
